Hunting has not been a sport for David Adams Richards, but rather a way of life-and one to be celebrated and defended.

The woods have become a part of him. When he first entered them with a gun as a young boy he found secret places that laid the framework of the template of my life.

He had entered a world of danger, where the struggle for life and death was revealed at its rawest. And one, too, of immense beauty-of wilds, hills and streams. It was home to magnificent animals and to people who respected them and whose wisdom about nature was at least the equal of any city-dweller’s.

Facing the Hunter is a memoir, a meditation and a polemic and, above all, shows a writer at the height of his powers, evoking the thrills and wonders of the land along the Mirimichi and Matapedia, the territory that has long informed his novels. Here we discover, in prose of unparalleled passion and beauty, what it has meant to David Adams Richards-the man as much as the novelist.